The most heavily trafficked tag was the strange coinage “Supervolcano.” Supervolcanoes had been a topic of mild intellectual interest for many years. Recently, people had talked much less about supervolcanoes, and with more pejoratives in their semantics.
Web-semantic traffic showed that people were actively shunning the subject of supervolcanoes. That scientific news seemed to be rubbing people the wrong way.
“So,” said Guillermo at last, “according to our best sources here, there are some giant … and I mean really giant magma plumes rising up and chewing at the West Coast of North America. Do we have a Family consensus about that issue?”
Raph still wasn’t buying it. “The other sources said that ‘Yellowstone’ was a supervolcano. Not ‘Yosemite.’ Yellowstone is way over in Montana.”
“You do agree that supervolcanoes exist, though.

…

Nobody else in the world wants to think about supervolcanoes.”
Buffy was losing her temper. “But this is so totally unbelievable! The sky already darkened! The black rain already fell on us! We already have a climate crisis, we have one going on right now! Now we’re supposed to have another crisis, out of nowhere, because California blows up from some supervolcano? What are the odds?”
“Well, that question’s pretty easy,” said Freddy. “A supervolcano under the Earth doesn’t care what we humans did to the sky. If it blows up, then it just blows up! So the odds of a supervolcano are exactly the same as they always were.”
Rishi, who was bright, had gotten all interested. “Well, what exactly are the odds of a supervolcano? How often do supervolcanoes erupt, and turn the sky black, completely wrecking the climate, and so forth?”

…

“They exist. If you insist. But the last supervolcano was seventy-four thousand years ago. Not during this business quarter. Not this year. Not even one thousand years. Seventy-four thousand years, Freddy.”
Freddy looked down and slowly quoted from his notepad. “ ‘The massive eruption of a supervolcano would be a planetary catastrophe. It would create years of freezing temperatures as volcanic dust and ash obscured the warmth of the sun. The sky will darken, black rain will fall, and the Earth will be plunged into the equivalent of a nuclear winter.’ ”
Guillermo’s face went sour. “Okay, that is total baloney. ‘Nuclear winter,’ that sounds extremely corny to me.”
“That’s because this source material is eighty years old. Geologists know a whole lot about supervolcanoes. Nobody else in the world wants to think about supervolcanoes.”

They may, of course, be correct, in which case you probably won’t be reading this, but I’m erring on the side of unbridled optimism on this point. Some people claim that the Mayan calendar says that the world will end on December 21, 2012. Why might this occur? One commentator (a website called Armageddon online) says it’s to do with shifts in magnetic fields. The same commentator gives odds of 10:1 against a supervolcano erupting on the same date.
That’s not it either. That’s just supervolcanoes. Other potentially devastating superevents might include a major eruption that triggers an earthquake, which triggers a series of other earthquakes or a tsunami the scale of which we’ve never experienced before. All of these events are highly unlikely to occur within our lifetimes, but they’re not impossible and if they were to occur the impacts could be catastrophic.

…

Toba, in Indonesia, about 70,000–77,000 years ago, was even bigger, probably the largest explosion on Earth in the past 25 million years.
Big bang
How you view earthquakes, volcanoes and tsunamis depends on where you live. If you live in Japan, for instance, you’ll be all too familiar with the destructive power of nature. If you live in San Francisco, and are relatively young, you will be less familiar. However, what we all have in common is that within living memory nobody has experienced what happens when a supervolcano explodes. Hopefully, nobody will know for at least a few thousand years. We’d cope, of course, but one sometimes wonders what the fallout would be in a world where supply-chain tolerances are so tight. The world is now interconnected like never before and global companies that source and transport components from all over the world cannot cope for long with major disturbances or disruptions in critical regions.

…

This volcano famously exploded around 1.3 million years ago and erupted an estimated 1,000km3 (240 cubic miles) of material. In contrast, in 1980, Mount St. Helens in the USA erupted just 1km3 (0.24 cubic miles) of material. Yellowstone is huge, as we can see from evidence of previous eruptions, and it tends to explode every 600,000 years or so. When was the last really big Yellowstone eruption? About 600,000 years ago!
Dire results So what might happen if Yellowstone, or another supervolcano, exploded during our lifetime? Nobody knows, of course, but the implications could be truly devastating.
“…They slept on the abyss without a surge—The waves were dead; the tides were in their grave, The Moon, their mistress, had expired before; The winds were withered in the stagnant air, And the clouds perished! Darkness had no need, Of aid from them—She was the universe”
Lord Byron, Darkness, 1816
First, the explosion would physically remove anything even remotely nearby and the loss of tree cover could potentially result in major soil erosion, mud jams and floods.

Also, inbreeding is more likely, with offspring having an increased chance of recessive or deleterious traits.20
When geneticists sequenced the DNA of chimps and humans, they made the staggering discovery that a single band of thirty to eighty chimps can have more genetic diversity than all seven billion humans alive today.21 We have very little genetic diversity, even though it could have developed since we diverged from chimps six million years ago. Research on mankind’s restricted gene variation indicates that humans migrated out of Africa about 60,000 years ago, and at some stage before that our numbers may have dwindled to as low as two thousand. Some geneticists hypothesize that this bottleneck was caused by the explosion of the Toba supervolcano in Indonesia and resulting major environmental change.22 Regardless of the cause, our genetic makeup hints at the fact that we were once in a perilous state, at the edge of extinction.23
More recent human history gives better examples of how to define the viable size of a space colony. When a new population is established by a small number of individuals from a larger population, it’s subject to the founder effect, first described by evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr.

…

His partial list of existential threats faced by humanity includes nuclear holocaust, genetically engineered superbugs, environmental disasters, asteroid impacts, terrorism, advanced and destructive artificial intelligence, uncontrollable nanotechnology, catastrophic high-energy physics experiments, and a totalitarian regime with advanced surveillance and mind-control technologies.
Regarding existential threats that might act as a filter in our future, Bostrom makes another point. The requirement is not that it has a significant probability of destroying humanity. Rather, it must be able to plausibly destroy any advanced civilization. Asteroid strikes and supervolcanoes don’t qualify because they’re random events that some civilizations will survive and others won’t experience because their planet and solar system are different from ours. The technological innovations that drive the argument and act more effectively as filters are those that almost all civilizations eventually discover, where their discovery almost universally leads to disaster (Figure 55).

As soon as Christiansen saw the photos he realized why he had failed to spot the caldera: virtually the whole park—2.2 million acres—was caldera. The explosion had left a crater more than forty miles across—much too huge to be perceived from anywhere at ground level. At some time in the past Yellowstone must have blown up with a violence far beyond the scale of anything known to humans.
Yellowstone, it turns out, is a supervolcano. It sits on top of an enormous hot spot, a reservoir of molten rock that rises from at least 125 miles down in the Earth. The heat from the hot spot is what powers all of Yellowstone's vents, geysers, hot springs, and popping mud pots. Beneath the surface is a magma chamber that is about forty-five miles across—roughly the same dimensions as the park—and about eight miles thick at its thickest point.

…

No one has the faintest idea how or why Yellowstone's ended up beneath a continental plate. Only two things are certain: that the crust at Yellowstone is thin and that the world beneath it is hot. But whether the crust is thin because of the hot spot or whether the hot spot is there because the crust is thin is a matter of heated (as it were) debate. The continental nature of the crust makes a huge difference to its eruptions. Where the other supervolcanoes tend to bubble away steadily and in a comparatively benign fashion, Yellowstone blows explosively. It doesn't happen often, but when it does you want to stand well back.
Since its first known eruption 16.5 million years ago, it has blown up about a hundred times, but the most recent three eruptions are the ones that get written about. The last eruption was a thousand times greater than that of Mount St.

…

And ash, it is worth remembering, is not like a big snowfall that will melt in the spring. If you wanted to grow crops again, you would have to find some place to put all the ash. It took thousands of workers eight months to clear 1.8 billion tons of debris from the sixteen acres of the World Trade Center site in New York. Imagine what it would take to clear Kansas.
And that's not even to consider the climatic consequences. The last supervolcano eruption on Earth was at Toba, in northern Sumatra, seventy-four thousand years ago. No one knows quite how big it was other than that it was a whopper. Greenland ice cores show that the Toba blast was followed by at least six years of “volcanic winter” and goodness knows how many poor growing seasons after that. The event, it is thought, may have carried humans right to the brink of extinction, reducing the global population to no more than a few thousand individuals.

The park is a place of almost indescribable spectacle, rightly popular and in consequence frequently, especially in the high summer, more crowded than is good for it. The wildlife, the mountains, the lakes and the geysers are all the very obvious lures for the hundreds of thousands who each season drive in through the park’s main gates. And these days there is a new reason: the widely publicized knowledge that Yellowstone Park sits on top of a potential super-volcano, the eruption of which – at some unpredictable moment in the geological near term – will devastate nearly all of Western America.
Most of Yellowstone is, in fact, the relic of a family of great volcanoes. There have been three periods of eruption, the first about two million years ago, the latest finishing around 600,000 years ago, with each spitting out, very violently, immeasurable quantities of lava and dust and ash.

Earth was two hundred light years away, the puppeteer fleet two light years distant, was receding at nearly lightspeed; and even the half-vaporized Liar had been invisible from the beginning of the flight. Now the meteoric gouge had faded from sight. How easy would it be to lose the ship entirely?
Tanj near impossible, Louis decided. To antispinward was the largest mountain men had ever seen. There couldn’t be many such supervolcanos on the Ringworld. To find the Liar one would aim for the mountain, then troll spinward for a linear gouge several thousand miles long.
... But the arch of the Ringworld blazed overhead: three million times the surface area of the Earth. There was room to get quite thoroughly lost on the Ringworld.
Nessus was beginning to stir. First one head, then the other emerged from beneath the puppeteer’s torso.

The hundred or so yearly seminars are taught by the top experts in their field. “Wolves of the World,” for example, is taught by Dr. Doug Smith, the project leader for the Yellowstone Gray Wolf Restoration Project. “Mammal Tracking” is taught by Dr. Jim Halfpenny, a prominent tracker and author of a popular tracking field guide, and the “Yellowstone Volcano” class is led by the two scientists featured in the popular BBC docudrama Supervolcano. Although workshops are held throughout the park, the home base for a majority of the field seminars is the Lamar Buffalo Ranch, a comfortable field campus in the park’s northeast corner. Overlooking the Lamar Valley, a haven for elk, bison, mule deer, and bighorn sheep, the ranch was the site of the park’s bison recovery project in the early 20th century. “The ranch is right in the middle of one of the richest wildlife habitats in North America,” says Jeff Brown, director of education for the institute.

Since I’m trying to be more of a judge than an advocate with this book (except for a chunk of material in the next chapter), I now examine four categories of arguments against the likelihood of radical intelligence enhancements.
1.Civilization Collapses
In my opinion, the most probable reason why mankind will never experience significant increases in machine or human intelligence is that our high-tech civilization won’t survive long enough for it to happen. That is, nuclear war, biological or nanotech weapons, or natural disasters such as super-volcanoes or asteroid strikes wipe out our species, or at least send us back to the Stone Age.
One of the most powerful, but strangest, arguments that civilization will probably soon collapse comes from Robin Hanson’s application of what’s known as Fermi’s Paradox. To give you an intuitive grasp of the argument, I present the following story:330
One day you wake up with a strange kind of amnesia in which you have forgotten everyone’s age and lost the ability to determine people’s age from their appearance.

Further south, the agricultural heartland of states like Missouri and Iowa would have been freezing tundra, blasted by dust-laden winds sweeping down from the ice cap, and underlain by layers of solid permafrost. During the ice age, humans were displaced far to the south, where places that are now subtropical, like Florida and California, maintained a temperate climate.
In addition, temperature swings were astonishingly rapid-several degrees in the space of a decade as the climate warmed and then cooled again. At one point, about 70,000 years ago, a huge supervolcano eruption in Indonesia blew thousands of cubic kilometres of dust and sulphur into the atmosphere, cutting off the Sun's heat and causing global temperatures to plummet. Humans were nearly wiped out in the ensuing ‘nuclear’ winter: the entire global human population crashed to somewhere between 15,000 and 40,000 individuals, a survival bottleneck which is still written in the genes of every human alive today.

The annual risk of collision with a very large asteroid, such as wiped out the dinosaurs, is put at about one in 100 billion. Given that such an event would greatly reduce human prosperity, it seems to be rather cheap of humankind to be spending as little as $4m a year to track such asteroids. Why are we not spending large sums stockpiling food caches in cities so that people can survive the risks from North Korean missiles, rogue robots, alien invaders, nuclear war, pandemics, super-volcanoes? Each risk may be very unlikely, but with the potential harm so very great, almost infinite resources deserve to be spent on them, and almost nothing on present causes of distress, under Weitzman’s argument.
In short, the extreme climate outcomes are so unlikely, and depend on such wild assumptions, that they do not dent my optimism one jot. If there is a 99 per cent chance that the world’s poor can grow much richer for a century while still emitting carbon dioxide, then who am I to deny them that chance?

A policy could thus be evaluated on the basis of how much of a differential advantage it gives to desired forms of technological development over undesired forms.3
Preferred order of arrival
Some technologies have an ambivalent effect on existential risks, increasing some existential risks while decreasing others. Superintelligence is one such technology.
We have seen in earlier chapters that the introduction of machine superintelligence would create a substantial existential risk. But it would reduce many other existential risks. Risks from nature—such as asteroid impacts, supervolcanoes, and natural pandemics—would be virtually eliminated, since superintelligence could deploy countermeasures against most such hazards, or at least demote them to the non-existential category (for instance, via space colonization).
These existential risks from nature are comparatively small over the relevant timescales. But superintelligence would also eliminate or reduce many anthropogenic risks.

To deal with the evolving strategies of viruses and bacteria, wash your hands, avoid sneezes, get a flu shot. Occasionally, as with Ebola, further measures are required. But once again, prudence, not alarm, is effective. The evolution of natural intelligences can be a source of awe and inspiration if we embrace it with prudence rather than spurn it with alarm.
All species go extinct. Homo sapiens will be no exception. We don’t know how it will happen—a virus, an alien invasion, nuclear war, a supervolcano, an asteroid, a red-giant sun. Yes, it could be AIs, but I would bet long odds against it. I would bet, instead, that AIs will be a source of awe, insight, inspiration, and yes, profit, for years to come.
MACHINES THAT THINK ARE IN THE MOVIES
ROGER SCHANK
Psychologist and computer scientist, Engines for Education, Inc.; author, Teaching Minds: How Cognitive Science Can Save Our Schools
Machines cannot think.

And the next such object to strike us is already out there at this moment, speeding towards us with nothing to stop it except human knowledge. Civilization is vulnerable to several other known types of disaster with similar levels of risk. For instance, ice ages occur more frequently than that, and ‘mini ice ages’ much more frequently – and some climatologists believe that they can happen with only a few years’ warning. A ‘super-volcano’ such as the one lurking under Yellowstone National Park could blot out the sun for years at a time. If it happened tomorrow our species could survive, by growing food using artificial light, and civilization could recover. But many would die, and the suffering would be so tremendous that such events should merit almost as much preventative effort as an extinction. We do not know the probability of a spontaneously occurring incurable plague, but we may guess that it is unacceptably high, since pandemics such as the Black Death in the fourteenth century have already shown us the sort of thing that can happen on a timescale of centuries.

Return to beginning of chapter
PARC NATUREL RÉGIONAL DES VOLCANS D’AUVERGNE
A vast tract of cloud-shrouded peaks, snowy uplands and jade-green valleys, the huge Parc Naturel Régional des Volcans d’Auvergne ( 04 73 65 64 00; www.parc-volcans-auvergne.com) occupies most of the western Massif Central, stretching for around 3950 sq km and 120km from base to tip. Its northerly area extends from the chain of extinct volcanoes known as the Chaîne des Puys and Monts Dômes, centring on the high point of Puy de Dôme (below). Further south are the Monts Dore and the snowy Puy de Sancy, a popular ski station and the Massif Central’s highest point. The park’s southern edge is marked by the wild, rugged Monts du Cantal, formed by an ancient supervolcano worn down over the millennia, and dominated by the lofty summit of the Plomb du Cantal (1855m).
* * *
FIERY FURNACES
With its peaceful pastures and verdant hills, it’s hard to believe that the Massif Central was once one of the most active volcanic areas in Western Europe. The area consists of three geological bands. The Chaîne des Puys and Monts Dômes, a chain of extinct volcanoes and cinder cones stretching in a 40km north–south line across the northern Massif Central, thrust up around 100,000 years ago.

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Return to beginning of chapter
MURAT
pop 2300 / elevation 930m
Tumbling down a steep basalt crag topped by a statue of the Virgin Mary, Murat is an excellent base for exploring the Monts du Cantal. With a cluster of dark stone houses huddled beneath the Rocher Bonnevie, it’s one of the prettiest towns in the Cantal and a popular hiking centre. To the west are the three lofty peaks of Puy Mary (1787m), Plomb du Cantal (1855m) and Puy de Perse-Arse (1686m), the last remnants of an exploded supervolcano that once covered the Cantal Massif.
Information
The tourist office ( 04 71 20 09 47; www.officedetourismepaysdemurat.com; 2 rue du Faubourg Notre-Dame; 9am-12.30pm & 1.30-7pm Mon-Sat, 9.30am-12.30pm & 2.30-6.30pm Sun Jul & Aug, 9am-noon & 2-6pm Mon-Sat & 10am-noon Sun Sep-Jun) is near the town hall, and has lots of info on walks and activities in the Cantal area.
Sights & Activities
Murat’s fine old town, with its twisting streets and wonky stone cottages, makes a lovely afternoon stroll.

With red rock deserts, petrified forests, blasting geysers and one massive hole in the ground, you might feel like you’ve stepped onto another planet.
Grand Canyon Needing little introduction, the Grand Canyon is mesmerizing. It’s a mile deep and 10 miles across and was carved over 6 million years. Take your time when you go (Click here).
Yellowstone Massive geysers, rainbow-colored thermal pools and the supervolcano it all sits on – this 3472-sq-mile national park certainly puts on a dazzling show (Click here).
Hawaiʻi Volcanoes National Park Home to two active volcanoes, this park is the place to go for a look at lava deserts, smoldering craters and, with luck, the sight of molten lava rolling into the ocean (Click here).
Carlsbad Caverns Take a two-mile walk along a subterranean passage to arrive in the great room – a veritable underground cathedral concealed in this massive cave system (Click here).

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DON’T MISS
Don a Stetson and gallop the sagebrush wilderness of Wyoming or Montana.
Fast Facts
» Hub city: Denver (population 600,000)
» Denver to Yellowstone National Park: 595 miles
» Time zone: Mountain (two hours behind NYC)
» States covered in this chapter: Colorado, Idaho, Montana & Wyoming
Did You Know?
Pitch your tent in Yellowstone National Park and you’ll be sleeping atop one of the world’s largest supervolcanoes. It’s active every 640,000 years: an eruption is due soon – give or take 10,000 years.
Resources
» Denver Post (www.denverpost.com) The region’s top newspaper
» 5280 (www.5280.com) Denver’s best monthly magazine
» Discount Ski Rental (www.rentskis.com) At major resorts
» 14ers (www.14ers.com) Resource for hikers climbing the Rockies’ highest summits
Rocky Mountains Highlights
Spotting bears, bison and geysers at Yellowstone National Park (Click here)
Reveling in Hollywood gone cowboy in Aspen (Click here)
Hiking and climbing in Grand Teton National Park (Click here)
Paddling top-notch whitewater at the Middle Fork of the Salmon River (Click here)
Exploring the urban outdoor mecca of Boulder (Click here)
Roaming the San Juan’s wild west towns in Southern Colorado (Click here)
Enjoying untamed frozen splendor in Glacier National Park (Click here)
Powder-skiing in the sunshine at Sun Valley (Click here)
Taking a shot of culture in the wilderness of Missoula (Click here)
History
Before the late 18th century, when French trappers and Spaniards stepped in, the Rocky Mountain area was a land of many tribes, including the Nez Percé, the Shoshone, the Crow, the Lakota and the Ute.

…

Yellowstone National Park
They grow their critters and geysers big up in Yellowstone, America’s first national park and Wyoming’s flagship attraction. From shaggy grizzlies to oversized bison and magnificent packs of wolves, this park boasts the lower 48’s most enigmatic concentration of wildlife. Throw in half the world’s geysers, the country’s largest high-altitude lake and a plethora of blue-ribbon rivers and waterfalls, all sitting pretty atop a giant supervolcano, and you’ll quickly realize you’ve stumbled across one of Mother Nature’s most fabulous creations.
When John Colter became the first white man to visit the area in 1807, the only inhabitants were Tukadikas (aka Sheepeaters), a Shoshone Bannock people who hunted bighorn sheep. Colter’s reports of exploding geysers and boiling mud holes (at first laughingly dismissed as tall tales) brought in expeditions and tourism interest eagerly funded by the railroads.

The ground, where they could see it through smoke and steam, was a mottled terrain of dully glowing lava: some of it the hot impact craters of recent big meteorites, some of it spewing up out of the Earth’s fractured crust. Oceans were dark at night, hazed with steam in daylight, their coasts difficult to make out, but clearly shallower than they had been. Florida was reaching out toward the Keys but being battered down and chipped away by bolides, and washed away by tsunamis, even as it did so. A year and a half ago, a big rock had torn the lid off the long-dormant Yellowstone supervolcano. That had been cloaking most of North America with ash ever since then; glimmers of yellow light in the northern extreme of their view hinted at a vast outpouring of magma. A long-suppressed habit told Dinah, absurdly, that she should go and turn on her radio in case Rufus was transmitting. This made the tears come, and that in turn made Ivy’s tears come, and so they spent the last half of the intermission, from perigee onward, gazing at Earth through water.

With a cluster of dark stone houses huddled beneath the Rocher Bonnevie, it’s one of the prettiest towns in the region and is a popular hiking and skiing hub.
Sights & Activities
The twisting streets and wonky stone cottages of Murat’s old town make an enjoyable afternoon stroll.
To the west are the lofty peaks of Puy Mary (1787m), Plomb du Cantal (1858m) and Puy de Peyre Arse (1806m), the last remnants of an exploded supervolcano that once covered the Cantal Massif.
Maison de la Faune MUSEUM
(www.murat.fr; adult/child €4.70/3.10; 10am-noon & 2-6pm Mon-Sat, 2-6pm Sun) Budding entomologists should make a beeline for this spiralling stone tower (opposite place de l’Hôtel de Ville), which houses more than 10,000 insects, butterflies and stuffed beasties from the Auvergne to the Amazon.
Rocher Bonnevie WALKING
For great views, brave the lung-busting climb to the top of Rocher Bonnevie.